Sunday, 29th of November, 2015

Tonight’s mostly electronic show ranges from electronic pop to noise to experimental hip-hop and dancefloor mutations around jungle, techno and dubstep.

LISTEN AGAIN via stream on demand at FBi’s website or podcast over here.

Sydney’s Anklepants is perhaps the most perverted electronic music act of the current age due to his disturbing (awesome) prosthetic penis face masks. He’s also a brilliant musician (and has been featured on this show for a lot longer than Ankepants existed, through his previous idm & breakcore acts). When touring the US recently he teamed up with Colorado artist Mr. Bill for a rather lush cover of the ’70s prog rock band Gentle Giant.

Canberra’s noisy indiepunk band Agency featured on last week’s show, and they launched their album in Sydney last week. One of the supports was Evan Dorrian, who’s one half of Spartak with Agency member Shoeb Ahmad, and tonight we hear his unsettling Agency remix – like his new solo material, it plays with constantly shifting tempos to wrongfoot the listener. Meanwhile Canberran duo P A R K S continue to impress with their experimental electronics.

With a far more ascetic take on “noise”, we follow up last week’s final track from Brisbane’s Ross Manning with another cut from his new album, featuring hand-made noise-generating contraptions.

Keeping it experimental, but a bit of a left turn and we end up in LA with arch-alt.hop master Busdriver, whose new album Thumbs dropped this week with the usual excellent west-coast production and collaborators galore, starting with Hemlock Ernst, the rap alias of Samuel T. Herring, frontman of synthpoppers Future Islands, and followed by the genius Daveed Diggs of Clipping. – experimental rap worlds colliding…
Finally we have a live collaboration with Oakland-based experimental artist Caural, nicely segueing into the junglist part of the evening…

Akkord‘s two members both made drum’n’bass as well as dubstep, 2step and so on in their solo incarnations, but as Akkord they’ve perfected a polished hybrid of techno, jungle and post-dubstep forms to become one of the most exciting electronic producers of the last few years.

Meanwhile, house & techno producer Paul Woolford has pulled off some of the most pitch-perfect junglist revivalism of the last years under his Special Request alias. It’s great to have a new album from him, if a little more on the rave tip. Segueing from Akkord with his great mind-meld of a remix, we then heard the amazing rolling breaks of his Lana Del Rey refix, and the bouncing grime-meets-jungle of his Wiley remix from earlier this year.

On Pinch’s Tectonic label, post-dubstep/techno artist Ipman opens his album with a piece of slowed-down heavy-as-fuck junglism too. The rest of the album isn’t quite in the same vein, but this is the real deal.

And finally we come to the dubstep/techno/jungle mélange of Addison Groove aka Headhunter. His earlier productions as Headhunter were forward-thinking dubstep with a techno impetus and plenty of syncopated rhythms (see that bouncy Tempa track from 2008). The change to Addison Groove only really focused more on the dancefloor, and by the time last year’s album came out, he’d imbibed a serious quantity of drum’n’bass & jungle with collaborations with Sam Binga & the legendary DJ Die – as well as juke, techno and house. The junglist elements are present in his new productions just released as Headhunter, but it’s definitely back to the dubstep bassweight. Fantastic sounds whichever name he chooses to use.

Labels and artists!

email: utilityfog at frogworth dot com
Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Whether cataloguing the jungle resurgence, tracking the ups and downs of noise and drone, or unearthing the remnants of glitch and folktronica, all is contextualised within artist & genre histories for a fulfilling sonic journey.
Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.